Our lives these days

G is doing martial arts now (I keep misspelling it as "marital"--um, no, not that). I took him to a local studio for a Parents Night Out thing--win-win: I get the night off, he gets a taste of their flavor of martial arts. He loved it. The office person emailed right away and said, "If he wants to do a free class, just call me and I'll set it up." So I had them set it up for the next Saturday's class, a mixed adult/kid thing for all levels, and he loved it. I ran an errand and came back to see him doing amazing things with an adult and a slightly older kid. Part of it was personal safety--yelling "NO! I DON'T KNOW YOU!" and part was breaking the hold the other kid had on him and turning it to his advantage. Amazingly cool stuff.

So he's signed up and has a gi and everything. It's not far from IKEA and JoAnne and Trader Joe's, so I can do errands while he's there. In a pinch, I can even jet back home and walk the dog or something. I do wish it were in town, though. That would be convenient.

As he starts on a new sport, I've been playing water polo for a few weeks now. It is amazing exercise. The classes are pretty sparse, but our teacher appealed to the department that it is a sports support class (or something), as Laney has a women's Water Polo team in the fall. We have as few as 3 or as many as 7, so we've never had a full scrimmage. I do remember scrimmaging against the team last fall in my lap swim class. That was fun (but of course humiliating, as they actually knew what they were doing). I figured at the beginning of the class that if it didn't kill me, I'd be in amazing shape. I do think it's helping a lot. I love that my legs ache when I get out of the pool. Great exercise.

G spent the day with my uncle and aunt last Saturday while I went to a knitting/crochet show and conference down in Santa Clara. I was a little nervous about spending too much money at the market on yarn I didn't really need, so when a free class came up, I jumped on it. I spent the class being Rita someone, but it was really interesting and geeky. Geeky knitting, what fun. And I pretty well stayed to my budget for the rest of the time there. My aunt apologized that they didn't get out and do more, but the weather was so crummy... hey, G got to play GameBoy the entire day. He was in heaven. (He conveniently "forgot" his GameBoy/Wii timer, on which he only had 3 hours left. My uncle said he played for more like 7 hours.) We were invited to beef-stew dinner and happily accepted.

Sunday, we pretty much putzed around after church until it was time for me to go to hockey. I made a bean soup and I thought of offering my friend Allison some of it... she called me yesterday to offer me some of hers! We laughed and decided to keep our own to make things simple.

Hockey was way fun, one of those games where everything feels good but we just don't manage to get the little lump of rubber in the nylon netting. I had some fun skirmishes for the puck and caught some nice passes and made some good crosses. Hm, I can't remember shooting more than once. I did catch a sweet pass from the face-off and sent it toward the net right away, but it was too wide. Dammit. We had 3 wing pairs for our game but it felt like we sat a lot. Then I came off once and Susan pointed out that I'd had two long shifts for my last two. Oops. I do have a hard time keeping track. I look for my wing pair usually, but I apparently need to be bonked on the head and told to scram. Dang, I thought I was getting better about taking short shifts!

I thought it was our last game but, yippee, we have two left! And both Sundays, so childcare is easier.

We're heading into March and I'm really looking forward to it. New hockey season, and a week off at Disneyland. What's not to like?